“Never Trust the Artist, Trust the Tale”: D.H. Lawrence’s “A Modern Lover” as an Aesthetic Autobiography

Abstract

The British writer D. H. Lawrence developed a particular manner of intertwining his life experience with the tools that fiction offered him, embodied in Modernism. In his short story ―A Modern Lover‖, this writer was able to unravel what the theorist Suzanne Nalbantian characterizes as the ―aesthetic autobiography‖, consisting precisely in the systematic transformation of raw biographical material into fictionalized scenes that build up a literary work. ―A Modern Lover‖, the ―aesthetic autobiography‖ in which Lawrence hid the autobiographical treasures of his intense youth with his close friend Jessie Chambers, works at different levels. The central autobiographical elements represent the deep workings of fiction at the level of characters, especially the protagonist, Cyril Mersham. The peripheral autobiographical elements represent a subjective, personal view on time and space, and how the same affects the narrative stream and the characters involved in the story. An analysis of the short story in question allows us to regard D. H. Lawrence among the modernist writers– Virginia Woolf and James Joyce–that changed the classical notions of autobiography and fiction, as well as opening new fields for literary criticism to expand.